by Ariel Schrag
“I love you,” said Adam.
“I love you, too,” she said.
They had sex that morning in the tent, both of them completely naked for the first time.
***
As soon as Adam returned to Piedmont, he informed his parents that he was going to be taking four extra classes that semester in order to graduate early and move back to New York in January, where he would get a job (if nothing else, June’s old comic book shop was sure to take him) and then start college in the fall. His parents didn’t believe him and he didn’t care. He studied his ass off. The only thing that mattered was getting back to Gillian. He imagined moving into her colorful little room in Fort Greene, giddy at the thought of waking up next to her every morning.
The apartment at Scholes Street had dismantled. Casey and June had moved back into the Columbia dorms, not as roommates. Ethan was elsewhere. He hadn’t been home when Adam returned from Michigan, and a few days later Adam flew back to California. He had thought about texting Ethan before he left, wanted to, but didn’t.
Casey and June didn’t really talk anymore, but Casey told Adam she saw June around campus with her girlfriend, a freshman from Iowa who was newly gay and appeared to worship June. Casey herself was dating a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer named Lucile. She was a public defender who had guest lectured at one of Casey’s classes. Adam’s mom had come to him in distress over the photo Casey e-mailed her of this über-butch woman, her arm draped proprietarily over Casey’s shoulder.
“But I just don’t understand,” his mom had said. “Casey’s beautiful.”
Adam had responded, “Uh, Casey being beautiful has nothing to do with it? Get over it, Mom. Casey likes her. Deal.”
And the more Adam said it, and soon got his never-really-cared-anyway dad to start saying it too, his mom, outnumbered and getting nowhere, eventually switched from freaking out about Casey being gay to the fact that Lucile was “a little too old for Casey. Don’t you think? Casey should be with a woman her own age . . .”
Upon dating Lucile, Casey had promptly switched her major from biology to prelaw. “I want to make effective social change in this world,” she said. “Not spend my life poring over agar slides.” But Adam, in his nights of frenzied studying, had become especially obsessed with his human anatomy class. Even though he wasn’t “trans” anymore, his interest in gender remained, and he was amazed to learn it wasn’t just chromosomes—XX or XY—that determine a person’s sex, but a whole array of factors. He wrote a paper on sexual differentiation, detailing how originally we are all “female,” but in “males” a gene on the Y chromosome releases hormones during phases of development. The timing and levels of these hormones, however, fluctuate from person to person, creating different results in each individual’s body and brain. He argued that because these sex-determining hormones have unique variation in the development of both XX and XY people and continue to fluctuate throughout life, that means a person’s sex is in some sense physically on a spectrum rather than the strict male/female dichotomy everyone is taught. That this broad diversity is really what’s “natural.”
Adam was so excited when he first realized this connection between gender identity and biology that he immediately went on one of the old trans message boards he used to frequent and left a long anonymous post explaining all the scientific details he’d learned. He expected to get a flurry of responses, but, instead, by the next morning there was only one comment: “cool!” and then, four days later, a peeved three-paragraph rant on whether or not people should be allowed to post anonymously. But whatever, Adam thought it was fascinating. He applied to Hunter, LaGuardia, Brooklyn, and Pace, with his projected major as biology.
Adam still hung around Brad and Colin and the rest, but rarely outside of school. He didn’t care anymore—they meant nothing to him—and he mainly had homework to do anyway. They could tell he didn’t care, and it made them love him.
“Hey, Adam, you coming to the Laserium this Friday?”
“Adam, we’re thinking of hitting Yosemite in a few weeks. You’re in—right, dude?”
All day he looked forward to the evening when he could talk on the phone or Skype with Gillian. That was the real part of his life, the part that mattered. But then things started to get weird.
It was mid-October when one night Gillian mentioned casually, “If either of us starts dating anyone.”
“What do you mean?” Adam said. “We’re dating.”
And she laughed and played it off, and they talked about something else. But a few days later on Skype it came up again and she said, “We’re not monogamous, Adam. You live across the country.”
“But I’m moving in three months,” he said. “I’m coming to you.”
And she just looked uncomfortable.
He remained in denial for as long as possible, telling himself she was just busy when she didn’t call him back, that her Internet was down when he didn’t see her on Skype. When they did talk, he was overly optimistic, a deluge of positivity and plans for the future flowing from his mouth at her pixelated—sometimes distorted, computer-frozen—image, the face that when he first returned to Piedmont had always looked so flushed and eager to talk to him but was now weary, compliant, as if their Skyping were one more thing on a “To Do” list.
Finally, she told him about Rory. “It’s getting serious,” she said, within the same sentence that she mentioned there was a Rory at all. When she explained who he was, how he worked at the museum with her, wanted to be a curator, her face grew appallingly excited, like she couldn’t help it, absolutely could not stop herself from smiling at the thought of him, he was just that great.
“A bio guy?” Adam said.
“Yeah, cis guy.” And she blushed and looked a little embarrassed but also proud, like she’d finally managed to come into her own, and wasn’t Adam happy for her?
And when he got upset—and, OK, maybe a little hysterical—her face turned impassive, and she said in that same cold, measured voice, the one she’d used during those horrible days at the end of New York, “I like him, Adam. And he’s my own age.”
“Are you having sex?” Adam asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“Are you?”
“Yes,” she said. And her pixel face computer-froze into a gruesome mask.
A couple nights later, Adam got drunk—more like obliterated—chugging from every bottle, including the crème de menthe, down in his parents’ liquor cabinet, and sent off a stream of instantly-regrettable-yet-in-the-moment-positively-unstoppable e-mails, dozens of ham-fisted, typo-filled variations on Your a slut, and I hopehe dumpa you andyou die alone. The next morning came her curt response. She didn’t think they should talk for a while.
And they didn’t. Adam went to school and did his homework and ate lunch with Brad and the gang, as a ghost. At night he lay in bed and imagined Gillian and Rory, their naked bodies pressed together, their mingling fluids. He wondered if she had told Rory about the depression. And Adam would thrash in his sheets and get up and dry heave into the toilet. He would lie back down, pass out for a moment, and then wake with an agonized start. Unable to do anything but get up again and pace around his shadowy room, his heart racing spastically. Every morning felt like waking up into a horror movie. He had no plan, no sense of a future, only buzzing, anxious chaos.
But then, after a few weeks, the anxiety subsided, the pain was somehow slightly less, and Adam was surprised when he was watching TV one night and actually laughed. Soon enough, he started to feel normal more often than not, and a part of this was that the person he really started talking to, some nights for hours at a time, was Ethan.
Adam had seen him on IM one night and sent a tentative hi, even though he was pretty sure it would go ignored. Instead, Ethan had written back right away, and they’d chatted, just super-casual stuff for a bit. The next night they were IM’ing again and decided to switch to the phone. It began kind of awkward, but soon they were talking n
onstop, speaking over each other, laughing, just like they were still back on Scholes Street and nothing had changed. Adam divulged the whole trans-lie saga with Gillian—and while at first he was worried that Ethan might be offended, Ethan just laughed and egged him for more details, then said that he was as of now officially optioning Adam’s life rights for his next film.
Ethan also told Adam about Rachel.
“Are you guys living together in New York?” Adam asked. “Is it amazing?”
“Um, yeah, not exactly . . .” said Ethan.
“Was she . . . still not OK with you being trans?” Adam asked.
Ever since learning Ethan was trans, Adam had always assumed that he and Rachel had broken up because of Ethan’s transition, that this was the big secret—“what had happened” with Rachel. But Ethan said, “No, that was never it,” and they stayed up till 3:00 A.M. on the phone, Ethan telling Adam the story he’d never told anyone else.
He’d realized he was trans the beginning of his senior year of high school. Rachel was his friend, and the night he told her, they made out for the first time. His parents had refused to listen at first, but he was so insistent, so desperate, they eventually agreed to let him start on hormones and pay for top surgery when he turned eighteen. Transitioning in high school was so intense that he and Rachel clung to each other, like they were the only two people in the world. After his top surgery, the doctors gave him a prescription for Vicodin, and he and Rachel took the pills together, and when the prescription ran out, they went and found more. Ethan had thought it was just for fun, like getting drunk occasionally, but then he realized Rachel was always taking the pills, that she was on them more often than not, and she’d moved on to stronger ones without telling him. He finally told her parents, even though they already hated him, thought he was a freak. They sent her to a fancy rehab, and when she got back, Ethan thought everything would be better, until he realized nothing had changed, that she was still using all the time. He’d made this big grand speech about him or the pills, and she broke up with him. That’s when he moved to New York.
“But what about when she came in August?” said Adam.
“It was horrible,” said Ethan. “She was still on pills and kept trying to get me to do them too. I felt like I didn’t even know who she was. If I ever really loved her. Or just used to love the pills. It’s really scary to see something you held so true—the most true—as false.”
They were silent for a moment.
“I told Gillian I loved her,” said Adam.
Had that been false too? If she could just leave him like that, move on to someone else, was it ever even really true?
“You did,” said Ethan. “That was real.”
He and Ethan were quiet awhile more, and Adam felt something welling inside him.
“Hey, Ethan?” Adam said. “I’m sorry. About, you know. In New York. Being a dick.”
“It’s cool,” said Ethan. “I’m sorry too.”
Ethan was living in a one-bedroom in Williamsburg, but he’d blown through his trust fund and the rent was bleeding his parents—“They keep saying it’s time I paid for my own shit, and they’re right”—and one night when Adam told Ethan how he had planned to move back to New York in January but now because of Gillian he wasn’t sure anymore, Ethan suggested that the two of them get a place. “Something cheap but cool, a bachelor pad. I mean, only if you want to . . .”
Adam almost exploded with joy.
At the beginning of December, Adam was accepted into Hunter for the fall, and at the end of the month, he walked into the noisy, bustling San Francisco Airport. And as he looked out at all the different people rushing around, names and flight gates blasting from the intercom, he felt a familiar surge of terror and excitement remembering how he had stood in this exact same spot last June on the brink of the summer unknown, same heavy bags, same red duffel strapped over his back, same boarding pass to NYC-LAGUARDIA, crumpled sweaty in his hand. Except this time his flight was leaving at 11:00 A.M., not ridiculous 6:15. He’d booked the ticket his damn self. Why had he ever thought it was so difficult?
Acknowledgments
Greatest thanks to my editor, Lauren Wein, and my agent, Merrilee Heifetz; to Molly Axtmann, Tania Schrag, Frederic Schrag, Julia Fuller, Toby Wincorn, Melissa Plaut, Kris Peterson, Anna Sochynsky, Gabrielle Bell, Liz Brown, Melissa Anderson, Kevin Seccia, and Charlotte Wells.
About the Author
ARIEL SCHRAG grew up in Berkeley, California. She is the author of the graphic memoirs Awkward, Definition, Potential, and Likewise, and has written for television series for HBO and Showtime. Adam is her first novel. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.